I recently had a chance to play the sequel to Dead Space on my PS3, and found it to be an emotionally confusing experience, but probably not in the way you think.Dead Space 2 is fun. Before you find yourself being satisfied by that and going to look at whatever sick things occupy your other tabs, I'll clarify by saying that I also found it to be confusing. Not in the sense that I didn't know what was going on, but in the sense that I experienced a range of emotions while playing.
Shit! Get... the... ffffff off me. Ow, my thumbs.
The first emotion is what I guess you would refer to as "Cheap thrills." The second: "Pure anger," and the third: "Satisfaction resulting from bitch-slapping a zombie with a rifle." The first thing you have to notice about Dead Space 2 (for the next few paragraphs Dead Space and Dead Space 2 are effectively the same thing) is how action-adventure-oriented it is.
There's nothing wrong with that, it's just a design decision. A financially sound one at that. Action Adventure sells better than pure horror - look at what direction Resident Evil 4 went in. There are barely any survival horror games around any more, despite the fact that video games are the prime medium to experience horror.
I'm not suggesting that Dead Space 2 would automatically be a better game if it were to introduce the wild changes I'm about to suggest, it would simply be a different kind of game. Whether that would be good or bad comes down to what you personally want from a horror game.
I want to avoid turning this into a review. That's not what this particular piece is about - it's about crazy speculation about what the world would be like if Dead Space were a slightly different game, so here we go. What could have been:
Change #1: Less Necromorphs:
Have you played Amnesia: The Dark Descent? If yes, you may or may not have had the unusual experience of needing to change your underwear more regularly than usual. Why the hell are the monsters in Amnesia so scary? Because you hardly see them, for a start.
In Dead Space, the reanimated corpses just can't get enough screen-time, and they really seem to enjoy hanging around in brightly-lit areas early on. Of course, this isn't always the case, but when you know exactly what they look like and what they're capable of, they're slightly less scary. It's a simple equation. The less you know about it, the more your mind fills in the blanks and the scarier it becomes. From the get-go Dead Space 2 has the problem of players already knowing who the enemy is and what's going on.
Amnesia induced so much pants-wetting because you had no idea when the hell the monsters were coming, or where they were coming from (see: Dead Space's tendency to break violins whenever enemies are nearby) and what they were, exactly. You also couldn't defend yourself at all, which brings me to:
Change #2: Less big guns, more shitty weapons:
You know what would make Dead Space 2 scarier? Having terrible weapons you have to make yourself, like a disturbed kid in his dad's tool shed. The Plasma Cutter is a perfect example - in theory, it's not actually supposed to be weapon, but Isaac has to grab it and use it to slice his foes to pieces, lest he be killed in horrific ways.
Later though, the developers change this trend and give you an assault rifle, for example. And detonator mines, and something that I think is supposed to be a sniper rifle.
If you want real horror, instead of being bogged down with large guns, what if you could make your own? Small, crappy makeshift weapons. To be honest, some of the weapons already in the game are like that - on purpose. What if you could craft them on work-benches? The line gun, a shoddy flame-thrower. Isaac is an engineer, right? Hell, combine Crysis/Metal Gear Solid 4 weapon customization and let the player stick all kinds of crazy shit on his weapon.
I'm not suggesting that the game goes all Monster Hunter Tri with random resource collection, but it may well add to the appeal if the weapons that you assemble from spare parts also degraded after heavy use. This would force you to choose between running away and shooting more often, as opposed to the current approach of "If you fail a room, shoot more things until they all die."
I'd like to reiterate that Dead Space focuses heavily on action, and that's just a design choice, but to me it doesn't seem like one that would fit well with horror. It's almost like two diametrically opposed ideas trying to fit through the door and into the game.
As a result, the game suffers somewhat because the only tool the game has for scaring you when you're lugging around an arsenal is cheap jump scares. Not that Dead Space doesn't do well for itself in terms of its jump-scares. It's slightly above B-Grade horror/thriller movies in terms of trying to scare you in that respect, and I found myself hitting the roof on several occasions.
There's nothing wrong with a cheap scare like that, but Dead Space needs bigger aspirations. It needs to make you sit in one spot of a room for ten minutes because you're too scared to go down that hallway, and maybe that faint noise in the background is a monster munching on some poor bastard's bones. Also, holy crap I'm pretty sure there's something behind me, but I don't want to turn around so I'm going to flail around and run for cover.
Change #3: More emphasis on psychological horror and characters:
One of the problems with the first game was that Isaac was a mute (apart from the grunting.) In theory, that's no big deal, but when the game expects you to feel empathetic for him and his girlfriend, you can't help but shrug. The second game tries to fix this by making Isaac actually have conversations with people, but there's never any insight revealed into his character. His feelings, dreams, love of chips, whatever.
It reminds me of the different methods of story-telling in games. In this case (and in the first game to some extent) the game goes 'in medias res' on your ass. This was obviously done because Dead Space is an action game, and gamers can't tolerate playing a game for more than three minutes unless there's something to kill.
In the first game, it makes sense to a degree, because the whole idea is you find this wrecked ship where the poop has hit the fan and you have to uncover exactly what happened, but I still question the decision to drop you in the middle of things.
At the risk of getting repetitive, Amnesia (which also throws you into the middle of the story) at least introduces you to the game slowly. It builds up the scares. You don't encounter your first enemy for a while.
What if Issac spent some time learning to walk on his own little ship first? Maybe he'd need to get some early zero-gravity action by going outside the ship to make a minor repair. Maybe subtle spooky hints could be dropped on the player at this point to keep interest and let you know all is not right with the world (like Amnesia, but I swear I'll stop mentioning that now.)
Another thing a horror game set in space needs to explain to its audience is that space is huge. That's where like, half the horror of the situation comes from. You're in space, stuck with no help, and space is big.
The concept of getting horror out of that is somewhat Lovecraftian, but that's perfect, because how insignificant you are compared to the events going on around you is freaky. And as previously stated, space is big. Scarily big. Your brain literally can not comprehend how goddamn big it is. If Dead Space conveyed that fact to its audience a little better at some point in the story (and repeatedly), it would become a lot more terrifying.
For example, let's say that Isaac has a surly engineer pal named... Ted. Ted has nagging feelings that he should have been born a woman, but that's a whole different story. One day while battling Necromorphs or whatever, Ted ends up stuck in a busted air-lock. It malfunctions, and he gets shot out into space in his groovy space suit. He's doomed because the ship you're on is still broken. You can't save him. Ted is gone.
Then, hell I don't know, that reality might just sink into the player. I'm no kind of wacky video game writer, but it's an idea. The thought of Ted being stuck out in cold, empty space until his suit runs out of oxygen is scary on a deep psychological level, and drives the reality of the situation your character is in home. He's doomed to float around in vast emptiness until he runs out of oxygen, or decides he can't take it any more and removes his helmet. Scary. This thought may constantly nag at the player as he progresses. A "Wonder how old Ted is holding up" sort of thing.
Could be better.
This all brings us to another design choice on EA's part (or Visceral Games or whatever.) Multiplayer. I haven't played it, but that's fine because this isn't a review of the game's multiplayer feature.
I'm not going to jump to conclusions and announce that the multiplayer must be terrible. Maybe it's awesome, I don't know. Play it yourself and find out. However, I can say this: it won't be something people purchase the game for. And I mean that in the sense that they won't purchase it as opposed to renting it just because it has multiplayer. That's what EA is going for by tacking it on, and making it only valid for one game disc unless you pay a fee.
It may be the most addicting, lasting multiplayer ever, but it doesn't matter. The people who buy it because of that are minimal. A better idea would be to focus on increasing the single player's replayability. Not every game needs a freaking multiplayer. I'm looking at you Bioshock.
This brings me to my final point though. How re-playable can a single player game with all my above changes be? Perhaps not very. Once you've experienced the horror, it may stay with you something awful, but it doesn't make you want to play through again until much later. However, EA's choice to make it more action-based does. Hell, I've played through the original Dead Space no less than four times.
But like I said, which kind of game would be best comes down to your own preference. I myself am becoming increasingly interested in horror games as times goes on. Hopefully they get a really kick-ass revival. Like I said, video games are interactive, and therefore the best possible medium for experiencing a horror story.
I'm off to play more Dead Space 2.
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